Assessing environmental justice through potential exposure to air pollution: A socio-spatial analysis in Madrid and Barcelona,Spain

The concept of environmental justice (EJ) has recently gained currency, both as a factor for and a goal of sustainable development. Its implementation in practice implies establishing current environmental injustice patterns and analysing planning policies, with the aim to reduce socio-demographic inequalities in the negative environmental impact borne by different population groups. This paper proposes a method to assess differential exposure to excessive pollution levels by socio-demographic groups in intra-urban spaces.The approach developed in this paper is based upon GIS and quantitative spatial analysis techniques. It incorporates the idea of an ‘environmental justice weighting scale’ for policy-making, using normative pollution thresholds to measure inequalities more objectively and consistently. Spain’s two largest cities, Madrid and Barcelona, have been chosen as case-studies, taking nitrogen dioxide as the pollutant, and the geographic distribution of six vulnerable population groups (children, elderly people and international immigrants) in the year 2010. The results reveal that a large part of these groups suffer exposure to air pollution exceeding the maximum permitted levels disproportionately, which would imply a case of environmental injustice.     

Dimensions of environmental justice in anti-gold mining movements in Latin America

The present article examines two Latin American gold mining conflicts, one in the city of Esquel (Patagonia in Argentina) and the other in Pascua–Lama (Chilean border with Argentina). We identify the emergence of three dimensions of environmental justice (distribution, recognition, participation) in the anti-mining movements of these two cases. The study finds that some dimensions of justice appear first (participation and recognition), while distribution emerges later, as movements jump scales engaging with national and international networks that provide a systemic perspective of the conflicts. The findings are consistent with other studies that refer to environmental justice as multi-scalar and context related. We also point to the relevance of studying decision-making procedures and jumping scales to understand how environmental justice claims are framed in resource extraction conflicts.     

新西兰地震灾害管理工作考察

应新西兰奥克兰地区政府的邀请，福建省地震局、泉州市政府、福州市地震局、厦门市地震局以及泉州市地震局的负责同志一行六人组成的福建省地震代表团于１９９９年８月２５日至９月３日访问了新西兰有关政府灾害管理部门和研究机构。此次访问的目的主要是考察新西兰政府防震减灾的管理工作，了解有关防震抗震技术的研究和应用情况，通过借鉴新西兰的经验和作法，推进我省地震重点监视防御地区的防震减灾工作，完善闽南地区综合防震减灾示范工程的建设。 此次新西兰之行，新西兰有关方面对福建地震代表团的周到安排和热情的接待，给大家留下…     

Enacting environmental justice in Singapore: Performative justice and the Green Volunteer Network

Environmental justice research has of late expanded beyond its’ original focus on the distribution of environmental ‘bads’ to debate injustices at a wide array of sites and scales. Despite this expansion, the applicability of an environmental justice framework to seemingly apolitical and banal expressions of environmental concerns remains open to question. This paper argues that environmental justice struggles can be located in the mundane environmental politics of Singapore, by employing a performative rather than rights-based approach to both justice and politics. It draws on qualitative research into volunteers’ practices in one Singaporean environmental organisation, and asserts that through their focus on experiential learning and re-inscribing ‘developmental’ spaces as spaces of care and justice, volunteers seek to redress the social, political and environmental injustices replete within the spatial politics of Singapore.     

Global environmental sustainability: Intragenerational equity and conceptions of justice in multilateral environmental regimes

With specific focus on two environmental regimes (the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and the Climate Change Convention), this paper seeks to indicate the prospects and limitations of the aspirations for distributive justice by the political South within the context of sustainability in general, and the institutions for global environmental governance in particular. It is argued that while these aspirations have produced important normative shifts in the rule-structure of global environmental management, they have not proved momentous enough to generate policies outside of what the prevailing neoliberal socio-economic regime might permit. Hence, although the texts of global environmental agreements accommodate concepts that express egalitarian notions of justice, core policies remain firmly rooted in market-based neoliberal interpretations of justice, which mainly serve to sustain the status quo.     

Performative justice: New directions in environmental and social justice

New explorations of justice are arising in the wake of post-structuralist and feminist critiques of abstract, generalized notions of justice in Western liberal democracies. These interventions are opening new avenues of study on discursive practices and performances that contest social and environmental injustices in everyday life. Feminist scholars argue for greater attention to the local and the particular, the embodied, gendered, emotion-based, ethnic subject of justice and injustice. Yet, limited research has been conducted on performative and performance-based relationships to justice, despite its potential to inform matters related the use and conservation of public goods and common spaces in everyday life. This critical review examines the notion of performativity and its application to justice, aiming to clarify and advance understanding and theorizing of a potentially valuable direction in environmental and social justice at the local level. We draw on Hobson’s articulation of performative justice, as it offers some useful insights into how injustices related to the appropriation of public green spaces agendas are being identified and new meanings are being constituted through local-level citizen practices. We argue, however, that such attempts appear to be identifying injustices and demonstrating the ‘what is’ of environmental and social justice, but not ‘what ought to be’. Directions for future research are offered, which include clarifying the application of performative theories to the study and practice of justice at the local level.     

Postcolonial environmental justice: Government and governance in India

In this paper, we investigate the context within which struggles for environmental justice are taking place in India. We explore the ways in which postcolonial patterns of government and governance in India affect the ends, the means and the representation of these struggles, focusing on three particular areas: state reform, the judiciary and public interest litigation, and environmental social movements. We argue that India differs from west in the ambitious yet incomplete and contradictory nature of government-sponsored intervention in the environment, and in the particular nature of its public sphere, both of which have been important in shaping struggles for environmental justice. Our wider intention is not merely to catalogue these differences, but to use the Indian material to raise questions about the emphases and implicit assumptions of western environmental justice literature, and reflect on how these may be need reconsideration when working in postcolonial contexts.     

新西兰碧玉的宝石学特征

以产自新西兰的碧玉样品作为研究对象,采用常规的宝石学测试、傅里叶变换红外光谱仪、环境扫描电子显微镜、等离子体质谱仪、X射线粉晶衍射仪,对其表面微观形貌、矿物组成、化学成分特征进行了较全面的研究。研究表明,新西兰碧玉的显微结构致密程度不高,矿物结晶颗粒粗细不一,局部具有定向性,其主要的矿物组成为角闪石,内含黑色的铬铁矿杂质。将新西兰碧玉的化学成分特征与新疆一带所产的碧玉相比较,主量元素和微量元素的含量均有所差别。     

Environmental justice as subtext or omission: Examining discourses of anti-incineration campaigning in Ireland

The incineration of waste is a controversial issue marked by a history of opposition from community groups and environmentalists around the globe. Opponents, particularly in the USA, have frequently adopted a discourse of environmental justice to challenge the legitimacy of incineration. In line with these broad geographies of resistance recent proposals to introduce municipal solid waste incinerators in Ireland have sparked a series of opposition campaigns. However an examination of the discourses of resistance adopted by campaigners in one specific site of resistance, the Galway region on the west coast of Ireland, indicates that the vocabulary of environmental justice has not been publicly articulated. This paper investigates this absence of environmental justice in the language of opposition. The research reveals an interwoven set of contingent conditions that conspire to inhibit the adoption of environmental justice discourses in Ireland. However these conditions are not static and a combination of pressures, both within and beyond Ireland, are creating a dynamic context that could promote the emergence of environmental justice discourses in the future.     

Neoliberalism and environmental justice in the United States environmental protection agency: Translating policy into managerial practice in hazardous waste remediation

In response to the failings of the aggressive neoliberalism of the Reagan era, the Clinton administration sought new ways to promote and deepen the neoliberal project. One of its strategies was to develop “neocommunitarian” programs to support political empowerment and economic self-sufficiency in marginalized communities. Its environmental justice policy became an important vehicle for delivering these programs. This paper examines ways in which one regional office of the US Environmental Protection Agency translated the Clinton administration's environmental justice policy into practical guidelines for its managers. It investigates how these guidelines affected the work of personnel in the EPA's program to clean up hazardous waste sites. It asks how the Clinton administration's approach to environmental justice--emphasizing data analysis, managed public participation, and economic opportunity--helped both to deepen the neoliberal project and to transform the geography of risk and remediation. Although the EPA was unable to “normalize” the environmental justice community--to make it a standardized target for the Clinton administration's empowerment programs--its environmental justice policy both contributed to subtle changes in the distribution of hazardous waste risk and made the delivery of neocommunitarian programs an important part of the work of remedial personnel.     

新西兰城市防震减灾

本文介绍了新西兰的地震背景以及城市防震减灾工作的组织机构、动作及相关措施。     

Environmental democratization and water justice in extractive frontiers of Colombia

Mechanisms of democratic participation have been activated in Colombia since 2006 for the purpose of protecting water sources, hydrosocial territories and peasant livelihoods. A chronological perspective on the numerous and varied cases illustrates their cumulative, transformative effect on judicial decisions taken by the high courts, which have endorsed these mechanisms of direct democracy and expanded the scope of democratization to socioenvironmental issues. The process of environmental democratization in Colombia has been gradual, starting with the creation of opportunities for citizen participation in the Constitution of 1991; followed in the first decade of this century by the activation of the mechanisms of democratic participation created; and culminating with the watershed Constitutional Court ruling T-445 of 2016, which confirmed the right of municipalities to consult with their citizens about mining and oil extraction in their territories. The cases are analyzed here through the lens of democratization and transformative and judicialized politics. The paper argues that the reconfiguration of power through the use and contestation of participatory mechanisms reveals an ambiguous state-formation process characterized by repressed democratization. It also demonstrates that the process of environmental democratization that started with the activation of the democratic participation mechanisms introduced in the Constitution of 1991 has been one of transformative democratic politics, in which a dynamic array of political actors have consolidated democratic participation on environmental issues through constitutional lobbying and activism.     

The role of tectonism in sequence development and facies distribution of Upper Oligocene cool-water carbonates: Coromandel Peninsula, New Zealand

The Torehina Formation is part of a cool‐water carbonate succession of Oligocene age in New Zealand that crops out on the Coromandel Peninsula, North Island. It contains two major transgressive sequences that record successive onlap of a once emergent landmass. The first sequence records marine flooding of non‐marine to marginal marine fan delta/estuarine facies, followed by deepening upward and formation of a low‐energy, deep (100+ m) muddy carbonate ramp. The capping sequence boundary is characterized by differential uplift and varies considerably in its character over a small (9 km²) area, varying from a burrowed glauconitic firmground to an erosional hardground to an undulatory marine contact to a palaeokarst with < 25 m relief. Sequence 2 sediments, which overlie the palaeokarst with minor (< 10°) angular unconformity, are clayey, marine (offshore) siltstones, whereas open‐marine limestones of equivalent age overlie the other boundary types with no apparent angular discordance. The siliciclastics could either represent lowstand channel deposits or may define interbank deposits contemporary with adjacent carbonates. Palaeogeographic restriction of palaeokarst and sequence 2 siliciclastics identifies a structural corridor oriented strike‐parallel to the adjacent Harauki Graben, which began to develop by this time. Palaeogeographical differences in the character of the basal limestone facies of sequence 2 also occur. These differences identify variation in accommodation during initial stages of deposition imposed by previous differential movement of fault blocks. As a result, relatively warm‐water (20 °C) Amphistegina‐bearing limestones in one area contrast with co‐existing deeper water, silty foraminiferal (benthic > planktic), echinoderm and bivalve limestones in another. This variation disappears upsection, which suggests that initial bathymetric differences were eliminated with renewed rise in sea level, yielding deeper water inner‐shelf sediment facies followed by the accumulation of still deeper, but higher energy, outer‐shelf bivalve and bryozoan facies. The sequence architecture of the Torehina Formation is controlled by tectonism, both long‐term subsidence and short‐term differential uplift. This arose as a result of increasing tectonic activity throughout proto‐New Zealand during the Late Oligocene. In such a system, local and regional variation in tectonism among adjacent basins can impose subtle to marked differences in the timing of sequence boundaries and the character of basin‐fill patterns.     

Welfare reform and the intra-regional migration of beneficiaries in New Zealand

This paper investigates the net effect of major cuts in welfare benefits and associated changes in the delivery of housing assistance on the relocation behavior of beneficiaries. It does so against an international literature which has documented the tendency of welfare recipients to adjust their costs of living by moving from urban to rural settlements. The paper reviews the literature on welfare and migration, introduces a theoretical framework based on a metropolitan labour market and then tests several hypotheses about the possible effects of benefits cuts on spatial adjustment. The research design uses quinquennial census data to compare core beneficiary relocation patterns with those of non-beneficiaries before and after the cuts to welfare benefits in the Wellington region of New Zealand in 1991. The period following the benefit cuts in New Zealand was characterised by increasing job opportunities which helped to mitigate their adverse effect and made it difficult to identify a more general down-market residential adjustment. While a downward adjustment in housing consumption by core beneficiaries was identified, residential movement from urban to the cheaper settlements in adjacent rural areas was only observed from former State house areas where the income effects of benefit cuts were compounded by increases in rents on former State houses. Thus, while this paper supports the findings of independent sample survey work, our census based analysis underscores the highly contingent nature of that response. Evidence of urban-rural migration is placed in the context of the government's `remote area policy' which attempts to dissuade beneficiaries (who are receiving a social security benefit related to their employment status) from moving without good reason to `remote' locations where job prospects are weak. The paper raises the more general policy issue where benefit cuts, designed to stimulate more active job searching among the unemployed, actually prompt some beneficiaries to relocate to the urban fringe and in some cases to remote parts of the country where job prospects are weak. The theoretical and policy implication of this paper is that there are geographical correlates to the reservation wage which need to be integrated into thinking about the participation consequences of setting benefit levels.     

SHRIMP monazite and zircon geochronology of high-grade metamorphism in New Zealand

Ion microprobe dating of zircon and monazite from high-grade gneisses has been used to (1) determine the timing of metamorphism in the Western Province of New Zealand, and (2) constrain the age of the protoliths from which the metamorphic rocks were derived. The Western Province comprises Westland, where mainly upper crustal rocks are exposed, and Fiordland, where middle to lower crustal levels crop out. In Westland, the oldest recognisable metamorphic event occurred at 360–370 Ma, penecontemporaneously with intrusion of the mid-Palaeozoic Karamea Batholith (c. 375 Ma). Metamorphism took place under low-pressure/high-temperature conditions, resulting in upper-amphibolite sillimanite-grade metamorphism of Lower Palaeozoic pelites (Greenland Group). Orthogneisses of younger (Cretaceous) age formed during emplacement of the Rahu Suite granite intrusives (c. 110 Ma) and were derived from protoliths including Cretaceous Separation Point suite and Devonian Karamea suite granites. In Fiordland, high-grade paragneisses with Greenland Group zircon age patterns were metamorphosed (M1) to sillimanite grade at 360 Ma. Concomitant with crustal thickening and further granite emplacement, M1 mineral assemblages were overprinted by higher-pressure kyanite-grade metamorphism (M2) at 330 Ma. It remains unclear whether the M2 event in Fiordland was primarily due to tectonic burial, as suggested by regional recumbent isoclinal folding, or whether it was due to magmatic loading, in keeping with the significant volumes of granite magma intruded at higher structural levels in the formerly contiguous Westland region. Metamorphism in Fiordland accompanied and outlasted emplacement of the Western Fiordland Orthogneiss (WFO) at 110–125 Ma. The WFO equilibrated under granulite facies conditions, whereas cover rocks underwent more limited recrystallization except for high-strain shear zones where conditions of lower to middle amphibolite facies were met. The juxtaposition of Palaeozoic kyanite-grade rocks against Cretaceous WFO granulites resulted from late Mesozoic extensional deformation and development of metamorphic core complexes in the Western Province.     

The consumption of space: Land, capital and place in the New Zealand wine industry

Geographers have developed a keen interest in the social production of space - in the way meanings and values are ascribed to places as a result of changing social, cultural and political processes. There is a need to explore this approach further, seeing how social and economic values of places are inter-related and how these values are constructed in often deliberate and concerted ways. There is also a need to explore how such values are consumed: how the values in place are traded, appropriated and redistributed, both through the products of places and in land markets. This paper examines the New Zealand wine industry where certain wine regions have been identified and developed in ways which attempt to emphasise their distinctiveness in terms of wine quality and thus enhance the value of the wine produced. Different strategies have been employed in this process of place construction and this reflects the differential role of capital, striving on the one hand to increase the price and marketability of the products of distinctive places but, on the other, careful not to over-inflate land values and thus restrict further expansion. The paper suggests that the issue of consumption of space, involving a complex relationship amongst land, capital and place, is worthy of further exploration.     

Integration of zircon color and zircon fission-track zonation patterns in orogenic belts: application to the Southern Alps, New Zealand

An exhumed crustal section of the Mesozoic Torlesse terrane underlies the Southern Alps collision zone in New Zealand. Since the Late Miocene, oblique horizontal shortening has formed the northeastern–southwestern trending orogen and exhumed the crustal section within it. On the eastern side, rocks are zeolite- to prehnite–pumpellyite-grade greywacke; on the western side rocks, they have the same protolith, but are greenschist to amphibolite facies of the Alpine Schist. Zircon crystals from sediments in east-flowing rivers (hinterland) have pre-orogenic fission-track ages (>80 Ma) and are dominated by pink, radiation-damaged grains (up to 60%). These zircons are derived from the upper 10 km crustal section (unreset FT color zone) that includes the Late Cenozoic zircon partial annealing zone; both fission tracks and color remain intact and unaffected by orogenesis. Many zircon crystals from sediments in west-flowing rivers (foreland) have synorogenic FT ages, and about 80% are colorless due to thermal annealing. They have been derived from rocks that originally lay in the reset FT color zone and the underlying reset FT colorless zone. The reset FT color zone occurs between 250 and 400 °C. In this zone, zircon crystals have color but reset FT ages that reflect the timing of orogenesis.     

Mid-Cretaceous granitic magmatism during the transition from subduction to extension in southern New Zealand: a chemical and tectonic synthesis

Regional geochronological studies indicate that mid-Cretaceous plutonism (the Hohonu Suite at 110 Ma) in the Hohonu Batholith, Western Province of New Zealand, occurred during a period of rapid tectonic change in the SW Pacific portion of Gondwana. The 30–40 m.y. preceding Hohonu Suite magmatism were dominated by the subduction-related plutonism of the Median Tectonic Zone volcanic arc. Between 125–118 Ma there was a major collisional event, inferred to be the result of collision between the Median Tectonic Zone and the Western Province. This collision resulted in melting of the Median Tectonic Zone arc underplate and generation of a distinctive suite of alkali-calcic granitoids, termed the Separation Point Suite. At 110 Ma there was another pulse of magmatism, restricted to the Buller terrane of the Western Province, and including the Hohonu Suite granitoids. This was followed almost immediately by extension, culminating in the opening of the Tasman Sea some 30 m.y. later. The Hohonu Suite granitoids overlap temporally with the last vestiges of collisional Separation Point magmas and the onset of crustal extension in the Western Province, and thus represent magmatism in a post-collisional setting. Hohonu Suite magmas are typically calc-alkaline, but retain a chemical signature which suggests that the earlier Separation Point Suite magmas and/or sources were involved in Hohonu Suite petrogenesis. A model is proposed in which rapid isothermal uplift, resulting from the post-collisional collapse of continental crust previously thickened during the Median Tectonic Zone collision, caused melting of lower continental crust to generate the Hohonu Suite granitoids. In this example, granitoid composition is a consequence of the composition of the source rocks and the conditions present during melting, and no geochemical signature indicative of the tectonic setting during magmatism is present.     

Tectonically driven fluid flow and gold mineralisation in active collisional orogenic belts: comparison between New Zealand and western Himalaya

Hydrothermal activity and mesothermal-styled gold mineralisation occurs near the main topographic divide of most active or young collisional mountain belts. The Southern Alps of New Zealand is used in this study as a model for the mineralising processes. The collisional tectonics results in a two-sided wedge-shaped orogen into which rock is transported horizontally. Upper crustal rocks pass through the orogen and leave the orogen by erosion, whereas lower crustal rocks are deformed into the mountain roots. High relief drives meteoric water flow to near the brittle–ductile transition. Lower to upper greenschist facies metamorphic reactions, driven by deformation at the crustal decollement and in the root, release water-rich fluids that rise through the orogen. Intimate chemical interaction between fluid and rock results in dissolution and later precipitation of gold, arsenic and sulphur. Fluid flow and mineralisation in the topographic divide region is facilitated by a network of steeply dipping faults and associated rock damage zones where oblique strike-slip faults intersect the thrust faults that strike subparallel to the main mountain range.The Nanga Parbat massif of the western Himalaya is an example of an active collisional zone which hosts hydrothermal activity but no gold mineralisation. The lack of gold mineralisation is due to the following factors: CO₂-dominated rising metamorphic fluid in dehydrated amphibolite-granulite facies metamorphic rocks does not dissolve gold and arsenic; hot (up to 400 °C) meteoric water confined to fractures in the gneiss limits dissolution of gold and arsenic; low density of hot water/dry steam, and low reduced sulphur content of fluid, restrict solubility of gold and arsenic; absence of fracture networks in the core of the massif and the small volumes of circulating fluid limit metal concentration; and lack of reactive rock compositions limits chemically mediated metal deposition.     

From ‘criminals of the earth’ to ‘stewards of the environment’: The social and environmental justice of Fair Trade gold

The recent emergence of the Fairtrade certification of gold in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa promises a radical new direction for the environmental governance of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). In doing so, it aims to tackle the longstanding environment and development challenges of the sector which mainstream policy has failed to alleviate. The move towards more responsible ASM practices is premised on the strategic deployment of a Fair Trade discourse that argues for its operators to be recognized not as criminals, but as valued and formalized parts of their broader economies. It is argued in this paper that this development intervention should be read within a social and environmental justice framework, one which directly answers the call from political geography for ‘compelling accounts’ of positive representations of the sector.Through a discourse analysis of 10 years of media reports, interviews and recorded life histories of key ASM and Fair Trade stakeholders in Tanzania, it shows how three strands of justice (conceptualized in terms of fairer distribution, procedure and recognition) are articulated by the Fair Trade gold movement and critically assesses the politics behind such a deliberate strategy. In particular, it argues that recognition is a key part of justice that has been underplayed by erstwhile analyses of Fair Trade. Through a case study of Tanzania, it is concluded that although significant progress has been made in terms of arguing for greater recognition for ASM operators, there remains a need to better link discourse with practice in establishing greater distributional justice.